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August 31 - September 6, 2001
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The ‘I never knew I was APIA until I got to college’ phenomena
By Neela Banerjee
In this year’s independent South Asian hit American Desi, the main character Krishna Reddy — or Kris, as he likes to call himself — takes off for college about as “whitewashed” as they come. In the course of the first couple of months, through a series of bumbling, comedic misadventures, he learns all about being Indian, falls in love with an Indian girl, and even learns an Indian folk dance or two.
While Piyush Dinker Pandya’s Indo-American teen flick doesn’t really qualify as a definitive statement on Asian Pacific Islander American youth, it does capture an important phenomenon: the development of APIA identity which happens — en masse — in the university setting. Through cultural organizations, political organizations and just sheer numbers, college and university campuses across the country are hotbeds of APIA activity, and often the place where APIA youth first come into a true understanding of what they stand for.
At many big universities, APIAs are very visible, often the largest minority, in places such as M.I.T. and Emory University. At Emory, APIAs make up some 20 percent of the student population. Sonia Sharma, program coordinator for Emory’s Office of Multicultural Programs, believes it is this critical mass of people that makes identity such a hot-button topic.
“I think when you come to college, it is just so apparent,” Sharma said. “There are the Korean student groups over there, the Indian student groups, the Muslim student groups. There is this strength in numbers that is hard to deny.”
Sharma said at Emory, the large umbrella group Students in Alliance for Asian American Concerns, which oversees all the APIA ethnic organizations, has affected positive change.
“I think students see what kind of stuff they can accomplish all working together, and it really is a great thing,” Sharma said.
Oberlin College junior Jane Lee said she was involved in APIA student organizations from her first year in college through her older sister.
“The best part about them was that it was a space where we could all talk about our issues and relate to each other without feeling self-conscious because you know that space was provided for that purpose,” Lee said.
Nora Yasumura, an assistant dean of Student Life at Dartmouth College, believes that the intense identity formation in college has a lot to do with the age group.
“This is the time in your life when you figure out who you are,” Yasumura said. As assistant dean, Yasumura is also an advisor to Asian and APIA students.
The students who grew up in heavily populated APIA communities, she said, often take their “Asian-ness” or culture for granted.
“Some students will say, ‘I never really thought about what my Asian identity meant to me,’” Yasumura said. “Then there are the students of Asian descent who come from a predominately white background and they, too, are thinking about their identity in a serious way for the first time.”
Emory senior Rama Mulukutla was one of only two Indian American students at her high school in Colorado.
“I had never seen as many Indian people as I saw in Atlanta,” Mulukutla said. “It is really reaffirming. Before I was always the sole representation of what an Indian person was like and the burden would fall on me to be the Indian voice.”
Critical Thinking
Oberlin College admissions officer Jill Medina said at some basic level it is about recognition, especially for students who have not been around APIAs before.
“I don’t know if it is the age or the college experience, but critical inquiry really starts to take form, this is when you really start to critically examine what you are learning,” Medina said. “To be able to work through those questions about yourself, whether it be in a class or an organization, is really key.”
Moreover, students become informed and make a political choice, Medina said.
Sharma desribed the challenge for students from different Asian American ethnicities in understanding where they fit into the larger APIA identity. Sharma said that she recently completed training for a mentor program at Emory where upper-classmen are matched with incoming freshman. For one activity during the training, she asked students to stand when they heard their ethnicity announced.
“So, I called African American and the African American students stood up. Then, I called Asian American and all the East Asian students stood up, but none of the South Asian students did, which I thought was really interesting because according to the work we do, [Indians] are classified as Asian American. I asked them about it, and they said they were waiting for me to say Indian American.
“A lot of students never thought of themselves as Asian American before they came to college,” Sharma continued. “I think, especially for the South Asian community. Growing up, you are surrounded by people who look like you, act like you and pray like you and it is not until you come to college that you are exposed to a larger Asian community. I don’t think that many Indian parents expose their kids to the rest of Asia in that way.”
Self-Imposed Isolation
While mentoring programs like Emory’s serve to bring students into the fold, a multicultural backlash in the mid-’90s found ethnic organizations facing criticism for “self-segregating.” APIA, African American and Latino organizations were seen as a form of reverse racism that excluded students and destroyed the larger campus community. Just this year, Harvard University student Justin Fong stirred up nationwide controversy with an inflammatory opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson supplement, Fifteen Minutes. Fong’s piece, “The Invasion,” held APIA stereotypes up for others to examine while critiquing the tendency for APIAs to segregate. He wrote: “But the real problem with all of this is that it perpetuates the stereotypes and the racial divisions that we already have. The more Asians stick to themselves, the more alienated we feel from their community, and the more alienated we feel from our community. We’re distancing ourselves here.”
Even though Fong’s article caused protests and nationwide e-mail debate with many APIAs defending their college communities, he also heard from people who agreed with him. Mulukutla said that when she first got to Emory, she had similar complaints.
“When I would see all the Indian kids sitting at one table and the black kids sitting at another and the Korean kids at another, I thought it was kind of limiting,” she said. “But as I have gotten to know these people, I see that its just natural. Whether they realize it right away and join those organizations, or whether it is subliminal and they end up sitting at those tables.”
Medina said that it is important to examine from which angle the issue is being criticized, and at whose agency.
She said, “The students are in the midst, some for the first time ever, of having positive affirmation. Why wouldn’t they want to be around people they feel comfortable with? That’s normal. Nobody criticizes the football team for hanging out together, ever. That’s school spirit. But when you have a bunch of Asian Americans talking about empowerment, saying that the internment was wrong, critically looking at curriculum issues — that’s bad?”
Sharma said at Emory, they are working on different ways to tackle the self-segregation issue. This year for the first time there is a Diversity Hall where students of different ethnicities are coming together in a living situation.
“I think a lot of times the burden is put on students of color around issues of self-segregation. But [people] have to understand that a lot of these students have never been around other people who look like them,” Sharma said. “A lot of the Indian students who grew up in rural Georgia get here and they are like, ‘Wow, there are so many of us.’ They love going to Diwali programs and they love absorbing their culture. The Indian students have been able to make the Diwali show something that every single person at Emory wants to go to. So, I don’t really look at it as a bad thing.”
Mulukutla, a resident advisor at the Emory’s Diversity Hall, believes that student organizations and coalitions provide the perfect neutral ground to break down barriers.
“When you have cultural differences and a rich history, you really have to invite people to come into that and learn,” she said. “If you don’t, it propagates the exclusivity and segregation. In order for people to understand you and treat you equally, you really need to have interaction.”
While both Sharma and Yasamura said that many white students are involved in the APIA organizations at their schools, this can become an issue to some. At Oberlin, APIA students often fight to retain ‘safe spaces’ where they can meet without having outsiders of the community there.
“I think student organizations should have private time. I mean how else is a community going to address its own internal concerns,” Medina said. “Much like I think white students who are figuring out how to be allies need to have that opportunity to figure things out on their own — to have the comfort level of saying, ‘What just happened? How come somebody just said I was a racist?’ And they can’t do that in mixed company where they will feel like saying that will make them seem like they are not progressive enough.”
Jane Lee agreed, saying that opening up APIA spaces to the larger community could have destructive effects.
“For me, once a white person steps into our meeting, they hold a certain amount of power over everyone because many of the issues we deal with are about how we feel in this West-dominated society,” Lee said. “And even if you make a concerted effort not to change what is going on in the meeting, it changes the whole atmosphere.”
The bottom line, Yasumura said, is that these groups help students in subtle — yet important — ways: “They sometimes say it is just the little things that they come to these organizations for, things they get from this community that they don’t get in other places.
“Sometimes its just little inside, ethnic jokes that their white friends won’t get.”
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